Course Description:

The computer has become a permanent fixture in the contemporary design office. To date, its abilities have been exploited to emulate the conventions and vocabulary of traditional media. This is a transitory manifestation of any new technology. This class investigates the potential which is contained in the digital world. In particular this course will wrestle with one technique which can describe and simulate built, and imagined environments, and is fundamentally a new and different way to represent design ideas, primarily because it incorporates the dynamics of time as well as of space. This class is a laboratory with the intention of familiarizing the students with geometric modeling, the construction of virtual worlds, and initiate a discussion of the social and cultural implications of the media. As the implications of the new media are extremely broad, students from all departments in the College, and the University are invited and encouraged to participate.

The pedagogical objectives for the class are to give students:

an understanding of geometric modeling, and its role in the design process,
familiarity with the creation of materiality in virtual world construction,
technical literacy in the conversion of a geometric model into an immersive virtual environment,
an introduction to the VRML file formats, for 3D content creation on the World Wide Web.

Individual Exercises:

There will be four individual exercises during the class which will introduce the student to a number of computer graphic methods and techniques used to construct real-time environments. A variety of different software applications will be used including Lightscape and 3D Studio MAX. The individual exercises are:

VRML97 Primitive Model Exercise:
Construct a VRML world with a text editor using only VRML97 primitive geometries.
Common Object Model Excercise:
Construct a model of a common everyday object using 3D Studio MAX. Export as VRML97 world.
Exterior/Urban Model Excercise:
Construct an exterior model of a building and its immediate surroundings using 3D Studio MAX. Convert to VRML97.
Interior Space Model Exercise:
Construct a 3D computer model of an interior space and produce a radiosity solution mesh using Lightscape. Convert this model to Open Inventor and VRML for real-time simulation.

Expectations and Prerequisites

Students will be evaluated on their individual models, and on their contribution to the class in general. Students are expected to become familiar with three-dimensional modeling in AutoCAD or FormZ, or some other modeling application. Students are expected to learn the basic material, lighting and rendering techniques in Lightscape and in 3D Studio MAX. It is assumed that students have prior experience with some type of graphic or CAD application including 3D modeling. Students with no prior 3D modeling experience are welcome and encouraged to take the class but will be expected to acquire the necessary 3D modeling skills on their own.

Grades will be based upon the following schedule:: - 10% class participation
- 15% VRML97 Primitive Model
- 15% Common Object Model; - 40% Urban Model; - 20% Interior Space Model

Process:

The creation of an interactive virtual environment requires successive iterations of three steps: first, geometric modeling; second, definition of materiality, and lighting; and third, translation into a format readable by a real-time simulation engine . Model construction will primarily take place at CAUP. Real-time simulations will take place at CAUP and at the Human Interface Technology Lab, (HIT Lab), which will allow the students to have access to the HIT Lab's resources and technical expertise.

Theoretical Context:

The myth of Sisyphus describes the miserable condition of a man trapped by his own desires and passions, eternally pushing a boulder up a hill with the knowledge and realization that such progress will only result in sending the stone crashing down to the bottom of the hill with no alternative but to repeat the labor again and again. The Sisyphean tendency of man with respect to our technological innovations have shaped our lives since the first stone was plucked from the earth and used to defend the bearer or provide him some meager sustenance. From stone to flint, and then on to the early molten implements, our ancestors have participated in this endless cycle of innovation. Intoxicated by our skill to manipulate the environment and to extend ourselves physically and cognitively, we have continued to become dependent on the products of our own hands. Only recently have we sobered to the fact that we become trapped by what we make. Norbet Wiener succinctly describes this condition,

We are the slaves of our technical improvement and we can no more return a New Hampshire farm to the self-contained state in which it was maintained in 1800 than we can, by taking thought, add a cubit to our stature or, what is more to the point, diminish it. We have modified ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. We can no longer live in the old one. Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape.

In the past our self-induced dependencies have developed over time, in some cases over hundreds of years. Any substantial technological change may have taken years to refine and then generations to permeate throughout a culture. Then, as that technology has become more commonplace and refined, the political and cultural turmoil created by the innovation has had an opportunity to subside, and society finds a way to re-balance and return to a degree of cultural equilibrium. This societal burning-in period has become more and more abbreviated over the last few hundred years. It has been observed numerous times how rapidly technological innovation continues to take place. The poignancy in such incrementally short cycles of development is not so much in the direct implications of the technological change but in the absence of a period of cultural re-calibration. Today this void in cultural stability is the norm. This phenomenon is a problem of scale between the relative proportions of material to social culture.

This diagrammatic characterization of technological change is very limiting because such developments never occur singularly. Development will always be extremely dynamic with hundreds of innovations taking place simultaneously, with the majority being trivial or inconsequential. Only a few of developments are significant enough to substantially change the technological and cultural landscape, and only a handful stand out as landmarks in human development. A list of these would include: the invention of language, the development of cultivation, the technology of the printing press, Newton's laws of physics, Einstein's theory of relativity, and perhaps, the digitization of information. The machine is upon us and we are dependent upon it. What shall we do with this dependency? What implications does the computer have for our discipline, the premeditated manipulation of the built environment? These are some of the questions and issues that frame the task laid before us. Is the digitization of information one of the dramatic revolutionary events of human development? How does virtual reality fit in to this shift in human communication? What is this media? What kind of paradigm is it?